


all the small things

by capriciouslouis



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: ...now even im making constant tiny puns without realising, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Save Me, THAT I FEEL LIKE ANYTHING IS AN IMPROVEMENT, bless his tiny heart, but we all know he'd never really be mean enough to do anything about it, everyone makes fun of ray, i figured better safe than sorry, it's mean but also lowkey hilarious, like a tiny smidge of angst, ray spends a lot of time plotting vengeance, the mature warning is literally only there because there's a small dick joke, the steelatom is fairly minor but THERE ARE SO FEW STEELATOM FICS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 04:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9965591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capriciouslouis/pseuds/capriciouslouis
Summary: So the question is," said Nate, "what are we going to do about tiny Ray?"Takes place during the events of 2x11. Due to a technical malfunction, Ray ends up the size of a grain of rice. The team all find it far funnier than it should be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote 90% of this just after watching 2x11, suddenly remembered it and finished it off in like ten minutes. Idk what this is even really about but there is an astonishing lack of steelatom fics in this fandom so I figured I'd just upload it anyway!! Yay
> 
> (Don't tell me they didn't all take the piss out of Ray off-screen because THEY ALL TOTALLY TOOK THE PISS OUT OF HIM OFF-SCREEN. Also Mick's friendship w George Washington is my fave thing ever, fight me)

So the question is," said Nate, "what are we going to do about tiny Ray?"  
  
"I heard that," said Ray, who was perched on his shoulder.  
  
Things in the manor house had not gone entirely to plan. On the plus side, they'd successfully extracted George Washington. He was currently sat with Mick in the kitchen, while the crook talked Washington through his proposals for a new battle strategy - one that involved a lot of gunpowder and little to no subtlety. The wisdom of leaving the two of them together was questionable, but while Mick was talking to "Georgie", he wasn't drinking to excess or glowering unnervingly into space, which appeared to be his primary hobbies. It kept him out of the way, in other words, while the rest of the Legends were discussing their current issue: Ray, who thanks to whatever Rip had done to all of their tech, was approximately the size of a fingernail.

It was disconcerting, being this tiny. He was sat precariously on Nate's shoulder, clinging to the fabric of his shirt for balance. The floor seemed worryingly far away. From where he sat, Nate's stubble looked like blades of dark grass emerging from his cheeks; the scent of his aftershave, which Ray normally liked, was overpowering. Actually, it was kind of giving him a headache. Although maybe that was because all of the team's voices seemed ridiculously loud, like they were all yelling. In turn, his voice had become tinny and pathetic.

He didn't like feeling like a problem. The feeling of helplessness was shameful; it was worse than when his suit had been destroyed entirely. Like this, he was worse than useless: he was an issue. A problem to be solved.  
  
"Until Jax can get Gideon up and running, there's not a lot we can do," said Sara. "Aside from try not to squish him."  
  
"Uh," Ray said. "I resent that."  
  
"Right now our focus has to be on catching Rip," continued Sara. "Whatever the Legion did to him, it really messed with his head. We need to contain him until Gideon can try and fix him up. Jax and Martin are working on it now, but it's gonna take time. Mick and I are gonna take George Washington back to his troops to try and draw Mick out. Nate and Amaya - you guys bring up the rear; you're our back-up."  
  
"You wanna dangle George Washington under Rip's nose? That's too risky, Sara."  
  
"It's the only plan we've got. Unless you have any better ideas."

Nate shrugged. This did dangerous things to the way Ray was balanced on his shoulder; yelping, he tipped sideways, clutching the fabric to try and hold himself steady. When he was safely anchored and Nate had stopped moving, Ray let out a breath.

"Nate, do you mind not doing that when I'm up here?" he said.  
  
"Sorry, what was that? I can't hear you."  
  
"I said can you -"  
  
"Yep, sorry Ray, I still can't hear you. I'm having trouble figuring out what's coming out of your tiny mouth."  
  
Nate and Sara were both smirking. If Ray had been full sized, he'd have given Nate a shove. Instead he was tempted to bite him, like a tiny mosquito.

"You guys are making fun of me, aren't you?"  
  
"Just a little bit," said Nate, measuring out a Ray-sized gap between his thumb and forefinger. Sara snorted with laughter. Even Amaya was smiling, although at least she had the good grace to try to hide it.  
  
"Suck my tiny dick," said Ray, with what little dignity he could muster.  
  
"Nah, I'll pass. Once you get back to normal though, I'd be happy to suck your slightly bigger than average dick, if the offer still stands."  
  
"I'm going to pretend that the rest of us were not privy to that conversation, Mr. Heywood," said Professor Stein, emerging from a side corridor with a slightly traumatised look on his face.

“Martin,” said Sara. “Just the man I wanted to see. Have you and Jax made any progress on getting Gideon back online?”

“Jefferson is doing his best, Miss Lance, but these things take time, and - ”

“Time is something we don’t have. We need to focus all of our time on catching Rip.”

“Evil Rip,” said Nate.

Sara gave him a look that would have made Ray fear for his life if it had been directed at him.

Nate raised his hands, once again making Ray wobble dangerously on his shoulder. “I’m just saying. I feel like we need some kind of distinction.”

Sara ignored him and turned back to Stein. “Even with George Washington out of the way, Rip could wreak untold havoc on the timeline. We need Gideon.”

“I will see if I can give Jefferson some assistance,” Stein said a little stiffly, and disappeared.

“We need a plan,” Sara said. “Until Gideon is functioning, we’re gonna stick around here for a while, but that doesn’t mean we can be idle. Amaya - you try and separate Mick and George Washington. You’re the only one who might get away with it. I need you to talk to Washington; find out everything he knows about the British army and see if any of that information might help us find Rip. Nate - with Gideon down, you’re our only point of historical reference. Can you go down to the library and look for any potential aberrations? Things you don’t recognise, or things Rip might potentially try to target in order to draw us out?

“In the meantime, I’m going to try and set up a holding cell. We need something that’ll stay secure without technological input, in case Gideon goes offline again once we have Rip in our possession. I don’t want him wandering around the ship doing damage.”

“What about me?” asked Ray.

“Uh,” said Sara. “Ray, you’re gonna have to sit this one out.”

“What? No, I - I can help. I can help Jax and Professor Stein try to fix the Waverider.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” said Nate. “No offence, Ray, but you’re the size of a grain of rice. Any falling equipment, loose wiring, sudden power influxes, any of that could be fatal to you.”

“Nate’s right,” said Sara. “Take a break. You can chill for a while in your room. Consider yourself lucky; you can take a nap.”

“I don’t wanna take a nap!” Ray said indignantly. “I wanna help!”

“I can’t risk one of the team crushing you by mistake. Or on purpose,” Sara added. “Stay away from Mick. I wouldn’t put it past him to squish you if you pissed him off.”

Ray looked around the room. Not one person seemed willing to stand up for him. Sara was resolute; Nate was fighting a smile, his cheek muscles twitching, way too amused by his predicament. In desperation, he tried to catch Amaya’s eye, but she wouldn’t look at him.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” said Sara. “But for now, you’re on the back burner.”

~*~

The worst part about being tiny, aside from the many opportunities it gave his teammates to poke fun at him, was that it was really boring.

Nate had dropped Ray off at his room about an hour ago, put him on his desk and left him to it, and since then Ray had alternated between sulking, pacing, and conducting furious arguments in his head with Sara, in which he utterly destroyed all of her points and proved beyond all doubt that he could still be useful even if he _was_ the size of a grain of rice. It didn’t help that in his heart of hearts, he knew she had a point. When the Atom suit was functioning, Ray’s smallness was an asset. He could be a spy, but he could also fight. His strength was still amplified by the dwarf star alloy; he had tech, he had comms, he had plenty of opportunities to be both badass and useful. But with his suit out of action, he was just...tiny.

There was nothing for him to do here except mope. Usually when he was small, he was in the middle of a mission; he had a clear-cut goal, and so he didn’t have time to focus on how bizarre the world seemed when it was so huge. Things were not built for tiny people. He couldn’t use any of the stuff in his room. There were at least four books he could have been reading, except they were on the bookshelf, and Ray wasn’t a gymnast or an amateur climber; he had no way of getting up there. Even if he did, and he could have got his hands on a book, he wasn’t convinced he’d have been able to open it. He might have been able to turn the pages at a push, but he could never have got any reading done; the letters would have been almost as tall as he was.

He couldn’t reach the TV or the computer. Music was too loud for his tiny ears, which seemed to pick up every single sound and amplify it ten dozen. For once, Ray wished he wasn’t so damn tidy. His desk was immaculate; there was nothing on it to keep him occupied. When he was excruciatingly bored and no one would play cards or watch movies with him - which was rare, since he usually had Nate - he tended to play I-Spy with Gideon, but obviously that was out of the question. Besides, even if Gideon had been operational, all Ray could currently see was too huge for him to wrap his head around. Everything was blown out of proportion. He felt like he didn’t even know what he was looking at, like something in his head had disconnected and nothing quite seemed real.

A knock on his door, loud as gunshots, disrupted his thoughts. Nate entered, along with a light wind that felt like a gale to Ray, blowing his hair wildly and making him stagger.

“Ray?” said Nate.

“Over here, Nate.”

Nate continued to look around the room, puzzled. He genuinely hadn’t heard him speak. Stifling a sigh, Ray raised his voice.

“Nate! Hey!” He waved his arms.

The motion caught Nate’s eye. He moved over to the desk and crouched. Even on his knees, his eye-level was way above Ray’s head; he had to crane his neck to try and make eye contact, and with Nate’s eyes the size of wrecking balls, he hadn’t a hope in hell of being able to look into both eyes at once.

“There you are,” said Nate. “How are you doing?”

“Pretty terribly, thanks for asking. Did Sara send you?”

“Nah, I wasn’t getting anywhere with my research, so I thought I’d come and check up on you.”

“Making sure I haven’t been squished?” Ray said sarcastically.

“Actually, I was more concerned about you getting swallowed up by the carpet. That happened to a tooth I lost once when I was a kid; we never found it. I was kind of concerned about you drowning in carpet fibres. We’d be looking for you, calling your name, and never find you again... We’d be treading on your tiny little corpse.” Nate shifted slightly. “Uh, Ray? I know I was kind of making fun of you before, but uh… do you mind coming back up on my shoulder? I really am having a hard time hearing you down there.”

Ray sighed. “Fine, but if you make one more joke about me being tiny, I’m going to crawl inside your ear and scream. Repeatedly. And I won’t come out.”

“Sounds fair.” Nate put his hand on the desk for Ray to crawl onto.

Gingerly, Ray put one foot onto Nate’s middle finger, then decided it was way too squishy. The safest way to proceed was on hands and knees. It was the weirdest texture; he couldn’t get his head around there being so much skin, and the slight give of it made him uncomfortable. Nate’s hand was warm, the heat radiating through the Atom suit that Ray still hadn’t taken off. He wanted to be able to revert to normal size as soon as the power came back on.

Carefully, Ray crawled into the centre of Nate’s palm and then gestured that he was ready to be moved. Nate lifted his hand, and the bottom dropped out of Ray’s stomach. He rushed upwards far too quickly; he closed his eyes and had no idea whether that made him feel more or less like vomiting. It was a sensation like being on a very rickety rollercoaster without a seatbelt; nothing to keep him strapped in. He was horribly aware that if Nate tilted his hand, or decided to drop him, there would be nothing to stop Ray plummeting to the floor. At this size, a drop like that would probably kill him. At the very least, he’d have half a dozen broken bones and everyone else would be way too big and clumsy to set them for him. His heart palpitated.

Then he was crawling onto the relative safety of Nate’s shoulder; a higher drop, but at least here he had handholds, namely Nate’s shirt. Gripping the fabric with both hands, Ray got himself settled, and then allowed himself to breathe a little more easily.

“You know, I feel like a parrot when I’m perched on your shoulder like this,” he griped.

“I kind of like it,” said Nate. “You being so small. It’s cute. You’re pocket-sized.”

“Yeah, well it’s bringing back more than a few memories I’d like to forget. The first time I tested the miniaturisation of the suit, there was a massive explosion that resulted in all of my friends and relatives believing I was dead for several months. Then Damien Darhk got hold of me and kept me in a little glass case on his desk like one of those sea monkeys you hatch out of a packet. So forgive me if I don’t find this quite so endearing as you do.”

Nate was silent for a while. Eventually, he said, “I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” said Ray, which wasn’t especially true. Out of all of the people on this ship, Nate probably knew him the best. He’d just kind of wanted to say something dramatic.

“There is one thing I do know about you,” said Nate. “You’re a hero.”

Ray snorted. “Please. I’m a liability. I’m useless like this, and you all know it. Sara said so herself. She’s put me in here to keep me out of the way.”

“...Is it okay if I move over to sit on the bed?”

The very thought of such movement made Ray want to puke, but he agreed before he could change his mind. Nate rose slowly and carefully, and it was only a few seconds before he was settled on Ray’s bed and the horrible rocking motion had ceased - but Ray’s stomach didn’t stop rioting the entire time. He took deep breaths. _God, please don’t let me puke on my boyfriend_ , he thought desperately.

“Okay,” said Nate when he was comfortably settled. “That’s bullshit. You’re not a liability. Sure, right now your situation isn’t ideal. Sara wants to keep you safe, like we all do. But that’s not to say you aren’t still a part of the team. If someone gets injured and they get left behind, it’s not because they’re useless and they’re holding the team back. It’s for their own safety. Maybe you can’t get involved right now, but that doesn’t make you a liability.”

“I’m not a hero,” Ray said bitterly. “I’m useless without my suit.”

“You know, Ray, that’s a whole lot of bullshit coming out of such a tiny mouth…”

Ray glared. “I will crawl inside your ear, Nate. I don’t care how long it takes to burst your eardrum. I’ll do it.”

“The Atom suit doesn’t make you a hero,” Nate said. “I’ve told you that before. It’s not the suit; it’s the man inside it. You’ve saved me before, and you didn’t need your suit to do that. You help people, Ray. You did it before the suit, and you can still do it now. Being a hero isn’t about fancy tech and super-powers; it’s about who you are. You made me Steel, remember? You saved my life. What did that have to do with the Atom suit?”

Ray fell silent, drumming his heels against Nate’s shoulder.

“Your real value to this team isn’t your tech,” continued Nate. “It’s everything else you do. It’s your heart. Your soul. Your brain.”

Ray snorted. “Yeah. I’m sure that would make me feel a lot better if my brain wasn’t just as tiny as the rest of me.”

“Oh, well now you’re just being pedantic.”

A sheepish grin broke across Ray’s face. “Maybe just a little,” he admitted.

They sat together in comfortable silence for a while. It was a little weird to be on the Waverider without the faint background hum of machinery and engines, without Gideon’s omniscient presence above. Once upon a time, the AI’s presence had made Ray a little uncomfortable; back when he’d started dating Kendra, he’d felt a bit uneasy about doing anything sexual in the ship, under Gideon’s watchful eye. Now, however, he had the opposite feeling. To be without Gideon was to be exposed. If Evil Rip came bursting in right now, they’d have no prior warning.

“I know I’ve been kind of making fun of you, but it does kind of suck having you this tiny,” Nate said. “Cos right now, I really wanna kiss you.”

“That does suck. But just so you know, I’m still mad about you getting everyone on the ship to call me ‘Tiny Ray’, so I wouldn’t kiss you back. Hypothetically.”

“Aw, well that’s not fair. I didn’t do that to you when you started making jokes about me being ‘hard’ whenever I Steel out.”

“My jokes were funny,” Ray pointed out. He’d been saving up a few more, primarily focused on Nate’s ‘steely gaze’, or various other puns about Nate being hard, but he didn’t feel much like using any of them right now.

“I’m sure once this is all over, you’ll appreciate my comedic genius.”

“Once this is all over, if I manage to survive without being squished, I’ll make you rue the day you made fun of me. No sex for a week. Maybe even two.”

“It was worth it,” Nate said, just as Amaya poked her head around the door.

“Nate, Sara needs us. We’re going to escort George Washington back to camp and wait for Rip to come after us.” Frowning, Amaya looked around the room. “Where’s Ray? You didn’t lose him, did you?”

Ray sighed. “I’m here, Amaya.”

“He’s fine,” Nate said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Amaya vanished, leaving the two of them alone again. Sighing, Ray rested the top of his head against Nate’s neck.

“I wish I was coming with you.”

“I know. Don’t worry, we’ll fix this. By the time we get back, Gideon will be up and running, we’ll have Rip safely contained, and you’ll be back to normal size and ready to get some payback. Trust me.”

“I trust you,” Ray said. “Go save George Washington.”

Nate carefully held out his finger for Ray to climb onto, which was a far more unpleasant experience than being balanced on his hand. Grimacing, Ray allowed himself to dangle in mid-air for a few seconds with a growing sense of nausea before Nate placed him back on the desk.

“Hurry back,” Ray said.

“Come on,” Nate said. “Have a little faith.” The broad grin on his face left no doubt whatsoever in Ray’s mind that the pun was one hundred percent intentional.

“I hate you.”

Laughing, Nate walked out of the room and went off to save the world, leaving Ray to sit, sulk, and plot his revenge for a little longer.

After all, he thought, there was still a rat aboard the Waverider somewhere. Maybe when he was big again, he’d catch it and hide it in Nate’s bed.  
  
Either way, the entire team would one day regret the day they dubbed him ‘Tiny Ray’.


End file.
